FT Makes It Clear: Yahoo's Patent Troll Move Was All Thompson

What is it about the Yahoo top job that makes otherwise respected business people look inane?

This Financial Times article has a money anonymous comment by someone familiar with the Yahoo-Facebook debacle:

One person familiar with Yahoo’s deliberations denied that the approach to Facebook was prompted by its imminent IPO. Rather, it reflected the hunt by new Yahoo chief executive Scott Thompson to boost the performance of all aspects of the company’s business, the person said.

I'm not sure what's worse: Yahoo is being a blatant profit-seeking troll going after a company just before a big payday when it is least able to defend itself publicly OR that the new CEO's first official act is to be a patent troll and not, say, reorganize the company, get the Asian asset talks back on track or come up with a working strategy. Again, this from the man who said innovation would be job one.

If Yahoo hobbles Facebook simply because it owns more patents, that may be a greater injustice than the Winkelvoss settlement. At least they loosely had the Facebook idea and semi-hired Mark Zuckerberg to work on it. Yahoo is just a sad, once-hot jilted divorcee of the Internet, looking to punish its new hot wife out of spite.

But it won't happen this time, the way it didn't happen when Yahoo pulled a similar move on Google before its IPO.